Aiming to remove an estimated 4 tons of debris from an inactive homeless encampment near the Torrey Pines Gliderport in La Jolla, San Diego’s Environmental Services Department called on the Fire-Rescue Department for help — and a helicopter.
City crews and contractors are conducting a cleanup this week on the north side of the gliderport parking lot near Black’s Beach. Because of the area’s steep terrain, a helicopter was brought in to hoist bags of trash and other debris and deposit them in large containers.
On March 27, one day of the operation, the cleanup lasted three hours, half of which included the helicopter. Fifty bags in bundles of three were transported out that day.
That beat the alternative of having people walk up and down the trails with heavy bags of trash, said Steve Lozano, deputy chief of the Fire-Rescue Department.
“Instead of doing one or two bundles per person, however long it takes them to get down and get up, we can get three to five bundles on a hook and do approximately 20 flights and just do it in a fraction of the time,” he said.
It also helped air crews fulfill their annual flight training requirements.
“It’s a great training environment for our pilots and our air operations crews to work in a real-world situation with an operation that they’re not usually used to,” Lozano said. “And it just makes them that much more proficient down the road when they’re doing rescue operations or any other kind of operation.”
Lozano said everything went without a hitch besides a helicopter medic and crew chief having a brief slip and fall while loading the helicopter. The rest of the operation ran smoothly, he said.
Before the cleanup crews arrived, city code officers visited the site to ensure no one was living there. The city also listed 24-hour notice of the operations.
The Torrey Pines Gliderport is not affected, except for a portion of the northern parking lot being closed.
More than 1,100 fires in San Diego last year may have begun in homeless encampments, amounting to roughly 20% of all blazes in the city, according to Fire-Rescue Department data obtained through a public records request by The San Diego Union-Tribune.
The 1,130 fires were an increase from 1,077 in 2023.
Overall, the department responded to more than 29,600 fires of all kinds during the past five years, records show. Of those, about 5,000 “likely” began in encampments — about 17% of the total.
The “Gilman fire” in La Jolla on Jan. 23 was determined to have started in a homeless camp near Gilman Drive and Via Alicante.
The Fire-Rescue Department classifies fires as “likely” originating in or near tent camps based on what 911 callers report and firefighters observe. Officials caution that the designation doesn’t necessarily mean every blaze originating in an encampment was started by a homeless person. Destruction caused by the fire can mean the cause remains unknown even after an investigation.
— San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Blake Nelson contributed to this report. ♦
